Some psycho was staring at me from across the gate at the Minsk airport. He’d been staring at me for a long time. On multiple occasions I had tried to hold this asshole’s gaze and each time I had looked away. But I decided I would really try this time, to hold his gaze, to match whatever the hell he was up to.
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Up I went and it was like jumping into ice water. His face was massive and scary. His eyes suggested an awful plan for me breeding in his mind. His face looked like it’d been pummeled before and had not quite bounced back. He wore a deadpan expression, with a tinge of knowingness, like he knew things about me that he shouldn’t. That I was a coward, and had frozen in shock on the playground when that boy attacked Steph. That I had run away when that psycho came at Piet in Hollywood. Or when that guy called me a pussy in Fort Lauderdale. He could see I was skinny and soft, and I couldn’t take it, orange daylight coming in sideways edging out his large body and with shame I looked to the ground.
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A voice speaking Russian piped in over the loudspeaker. Somewhere a barista grinded beans. The white noise of the airport was ramping up, reinforcing the fact that I was really losing it. The asshole was still seated, but looming in my peripheral now to such a degree that the radius of my central vision had decreased to the size of a dot. Nothing was discernible except this bastard sitting squarely at my vanishing point. I felt the outline of my body losing purchase and I was becoming one of the many beta male apparitions inhabiting him and giving him power. His subjugation of me was absolute.
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“Should we sit by the window?” It was Yulia. She had herbal teas. I followed her to the row of seats in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I stole a glance at the man. He was no longer looking at me. His gaze had remained fixed, fixed on a soccer game playing on a television screen, mounted on the wall behind where I’d been sitting. I’d completely invented his domination of me and I wanted to laugh and tell Yulia but I couldn’t.
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The fading sun had turned the large windows reflective, such that the interior of the space held equal visual measure with the runway outside. I took in our reflection, a calming, painterly sight with the distant pine trees and planes mixed with us sitting side-by-side. Despite the fatigue of travel, Yulia glowed with such health and big ideas. The only scenarios she was inventing were bright dreams and they included me. You’re a lucky ass dude. Get it together. Your problem is focus. You’re focused on yourself. Focus on HER.
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I did, I do. But when she left to find a restroom I was left with just my reflection in the window and a plane taxied through my neck.
